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Our way too short and too hot summer is winding down. Next week begins the week of meetings and school begins the following Monday. I am preparing for another exciting busy semester. Thanks for understanding that I had to take a break from the blog.

As a longtime fan of Tufte, the information presented using the software is presented in a way that, I imagine, Tufte would find awesome. I encourage everyone to take a look and see if it can be used in the classroom to display large amounts of data that change over time (trends). I can almost guarantee that students will be enthralled by the movement. Seeing data in action is so much more powerful than just seeing a series of bar graphs.

Staying in the same vein as the last post, I found another interesting site that makes Twitter a little bit more interesting. TweetPsych is a site that allows an user to enter any twitterer’s username and get a brief psychological profile. It’s fairly interesting to see the results.

I came across a really interesting site called Twicsy. The site allows users to search images that people have linked to on twitter.

The site is interesting in that you can search for a topic (such as Iran) and get a page of results. When you hover over an image, it is englarged in a popout. When you click on the image you are directed to a page with a larger version of the image and tweets related to the image. Very cool stuff.

Even though school is out for the summer, I decided to do a post on classroom tools that are available free. I’m not going to discuss GoogleDocs or Zoho or PBWiki here, these will be more visual tools – video and image tools.

Both of these articles deal with the expectations of students vs. instructors vs. system/standardized tests.

In the first editorial Eric Fox, an English professor, bemoans the shift to edutainment (not the word he uses) from education. He blames the shift on “packaged minds fresh off the factory farm of iPod, “American Idol” and Facebook, a vast herd of electronic sheep stuffed with fast facts and establishment filler.” It’s the establishment filler (I might have called it a filter) that Fox has the issue with.

The second editorial written by Laura Braziel a graduating senior at UGA, explains how students can “game” the system and become an honors graduate from a top five journalism school at a major university without actually learning much. She blames standardized testing.

As someone who works in instructional technology, these editorials are disconcerting. I have a passion for education and for learning. I believe technology should not get in the way of learning, but should enhance and deepen the learning process. I have mixed feelings about standarized tests and their impact on learning and curriculum. What you think?